Thinning my veg

My other half googled whether turnips were supposed to flower before producing the turnip. They're not. In fact once they flower, that's it, game over. Either they won't produce a turnip at all or the turnip they've already produced will have gone all woody.

The YouTube video he found said they often did it because the weather was too hot. Well, having sat here freezing in multiple jumpers all May, I know it wasn't that. Which makes me think they must be stressed in some other way.  My vote is for lack of water (I didn't water them much because they looked big and healthy enough to survive with the occasional deluges we've been having) or overcrowding. So I decided to thin.

I ripped out all the turnips that had flowered already and thinned them to fewer than one every 10 cm. Only one had a decent sized turnip on the end - well, decent is a relative term here. Let me rephrase that: a turnip thicker than a piece of string. 

I thinned my other brassicas as well,  as I don't want them bolting.

I'm not convinced the purple sprouting broccoli is going to survive,  as I transplanted the biggest ones to the only viable positions given the huge amount of room they need and now they're wilting. Still, I still have some in reserve in pots.
I've also had my first harvest of kale from my thinning: cavolo nero from the back garden (left) and red Siberian (right) from the front.

In other news, my peas are flowering already - but that's good news because the flowers turn into the peas.

Also, the runner beans have mainly found their poles and curled themselves round them. Unlike last year, there hasn't been a massacre by slug yet.

The tomatoes have also practically outgrown their cloches. This is excellent news in the sense that they've grown, but bad news in that I'm not allowing them out till Tuesday, as the weather's not due to be consistently good till then. I hope this is the less damaging decision.